Converting a Python Float to a String without losing precision

Question

I am maintaining a Python script that uses xlrd to retrieve values from Excel spreadsheets, and then do various things with them. Some of the cells in the spreadshe

Answer 1

EDIT: Cleared my previous answer b/c it didn't work properly.

I'm on Python 2.6.5 and this works for me:

a = 0.38288746115497402
print repr(a)
type(repr(a))    #Says it's a string

Note: This just converts to a string. You'll need to convert to Decimal yourself later if needed.